Béla Bartók

13 Easy Pieces for Flute and Piano

This album contains arrangements of piano pieces written by Béla Bartók (1881-1945) in his youth for piano pupils (Ten Easy Piano Pieces, For Children, The First Term at the Piano). Most are arrangements of Hungarian or Slovak folk songs, while the rest are based on the composer's own melodies. The pieces appear in order of difficulty, but even the simplest can be used as effective performance pieces. The album is recommended for the first three years of flute learning, and the first four pieces are playable within the first year. A piano accompaniment for each piece and a full performance by noted Hungarian musicians is provided on the accompanying CD to facilitate practice athome and help in developing a suitably styled performance of Bartók's music.
In 2015 we are launching a series entitled Bartók Transcriptions for Music Students to mark the 70th anniversary of the composer s death. This involves reissuing our tried publications, and publishing some further, new transcriptions that fulfill in every respect the strict aesthetic demands of the earlier ones. We trust these publications will allow us to introduce still more music students to the realm of one of the great geniuses of 20th-century music.